“What the amateur reader wants, given the thickets of uncertainty that surround the garden, is not what the passionate polemicists want – not so much a verdict on whether Jesus was nasty or nice as a sense of what, if anything, was new in his preaching. … Did the rise of Christendom take place because historical plates were moving, with a poor martyred prophet caught between, or did one small pebble of parable and preaching start the avalanche that ended the antique world?”